Cornflakes

A fraternal conflict as the engine of worldwide success

John Harvey Kellogg (Battle Creek, Michigan, April 7, 1860 - October 6, 1951)

The story of the corn flakes, an American word that simply means 'corn flakes', begins somewhere in the nineteenth century in the town of Battle Creek in the US state of Michigan.

There then settled a group of Seventh Day Adventists, an evangelical movement that places a strong emphasis on health. The old men of this Church found it urgent that one of their children should study medicine. Then they could give their movement a scientific basis.

Their eye fell on John Harvey Kellogg, the bright son of the local broom dealer. John did not disappoint the elders, he studied well and became a physician with an excellent reputation.

He became head of the local sanatorium, founded a health institute and built it into the most famous spa in the United States. Anyone who had money and an ailment at the same time had to go to Kellogg.

A large spa also meant a lot of work. But then John had found something. The broom merchant's family had many children. The seventh, a boy named William, seemed a bit dumb and could work well.

In 1880, when he turned twenty, the somewhat retarded William was allowed to work for his big, successful brother. William became the jack of all trades, he was bookkeeper and cashier, errand boy and porter, he just did everything that didn't directly belong to the medical sphere.

He worked an average of one hundred and twenty hours a week, even on Christmas Day he worked fifteen hours year after year.

The doctor's domineering personality led to tensions. Well known in the town was the image of the doctor who went for a ride on his bicycle every evening, and poor William, who ran beside him, notebook in hand, to jot down the last orders.

After his day job, William was also supposed to conduct nutritional experiments with his brother. They developed a range of grain-based food products, a coffee substitute, toasted muesli and a new type of peanut butter.

In one of the experiments, they boiled wheat, put it through a press and then made long strips of dough. It yielded nothing. One day in 1894, after cooking the wheat, the men were called away.

Although the mash looked pretty stale afterwards, they still wanted to see what happened when they ran it through their press. The wheat grains did not turn into the usual sticky strips of dough, but into small thin flakes.

Coincidentally, the brothers had stumbled upon a process for evenly distributing the moisture content in cooked grain, a method of causing flocculation. Once toasted, the new food tasted crunchy and light.

They initially only produced the flakes for the residents of the spa, but soon orders from former patients also came in. Despite the secrecy, the method of preparing the flakes leaked out.

Between 1900 and 1905, 42 related product companies sprang up in the Battle Creek area.

At that time, the two brothers quarreled over the investment in a new factory. On April 1, 1906, William started his own company of corn flakes, the corn flakes that he had previously developed after the example of wheat flakes.

After 25 years, the youngest Kellogg had finally slipped under the wing of his superior brother. At the same time, the Adventists expelled William from their Church for being too worldly.

The success of the new breakfast product was simply mind-boggling. William turned out to be a brilliant entrepreneur. In a few years, he produced more than forty different breakfast cereals in factories in sixteen countries, which he marketed in 130 countries, all over the world.

Dr. John was furious and, above all, resentful. He felt that the signature William printed on his cereal boxes suggested that he himself, as a renowned doctor, guaranteed the quality, and he sued.

The lawsuits were especially successful for William and led to a total rift between the two brothers. Though they both lived to be 91 years old, they would never exchange another word.

Shortly before his death in 1943, Dr. John sent a conciliatory note to his brother, but he died just before it reached William. William gave away his money in droves, but when he in turn died in 1951, his fortune was still estimated at $ 50 million.

Nearly twenty years earlier, the broom dealer's dumbest son had made a will that his funeral cost no more than $500.

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